


Put my brain straight

by Butterfish



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hospital, Gen, Hospitals, M/M, Mystery, Recovery, self discovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-12
Updated: 2013-03-12
Packaged: 2017-12-05 02:51:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/718019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Butterfish/pseuds/Butterfish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While working at a hospital Alfred starts noticing a lonely, sleeping guy named Arthur. No one really knows who he is or how he ended up at the hospital, but perhaps Alfred can figure him out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Put my brain straight

**Part 1  
** I’d just moved to town the first time I met Arthur Kirkland. Back then he was a lifeless body in a hospital bed. I was running through the empty, white hallways looking for a nurse to guide me as I stumbled into his room and found myself staring at him. I’d never seen him before and never heard of his name, but still something about his peaceful, sleeping face made me hang in over his bed to get a closer look. Back then I didn’t know that beneath his white duvet was a hungered body with bones poking out like endless hills in an English landscape, I just stared at his chubby cheeks and admired the child-like smile which he breathed onto his lips whenever something good seemed to cross his mind. His name was written on a note taped onto one of the bedposts. I read it four times as if it was important information I needed to remember.

“Arthur Kirkland, Arthur Kirkland,” I muttered and followed the letters with my thumb. “Nice to meet you, Arthur, I’m Alfred.” I patted his bed and smiled silly, almost expecting him to breathe yet a smile, but instead his lips curved into a pout and he gasped in air. Soon he gasped in again - and again and again as if his lungs didn’t register that he was snoozing oxygen and soon the whole room was filled with nurses and doctors who stared at me as if I’d caused their patient to suddenly break down.

“I just said his name,” I mumbled at a nurse as she pushed me outside.

“Are you a family member?”

“I was just curious to see what he looked like,” was my weak reply.

She looked me up and down, her mask-covered face appearing scary. She looked like she was about to perform an operation and the moment she slipped back into Arthur’s room and left me standing in the hallway, I imagined she would come back any second now with blood dripping from her lips and an insane glimpse covering her eyes as she would whisper:

“He didn’t make it!”

\- but instead she returned with a young man who shook my hand and asked who I was looking for.

“Well, I’m Alfred Jones, I’m the new hospital-clown.”

“Oh,” he said and gestured for me to follow him as he headed for his office, “that explains a thing or two.” I guess I should’ve been insulted, but I shrugged it off. At the time my thoughts were still with Arthur hyperventilating in bed.  
  
 **Part 2  
** I grew up in a small town where nothing ever happens and nothing ever can happen because everyone knows everyone, so if you dare to cause a little chaos, the mess will come back to haunt you even years later. But I was a messy boy and before I finished high school I had a reputation I couldn’t escape. When I went out Friday night for a beer at the pub, the girls would shy away from me and whisper:

“He’s up to no good.” Admittedly I’d been a fool at times; letting out old Mr Gregor’s chickens because I didn’t think they belonged on a farm and finding them days later dead on the road was a mistake, and stealing the answers to the final exam in maths before selling them to everyone was not too smart either. But wherever I went I felt I needed to do something extraordinary to be noticed and as I didn’t know how to do things well, I would rather start out doing them bad. At least then the end result would be a success no matter what.

“You’ll never amount to anything,” my dad muttered sadly as I packed my things to leave a Monday morning. I’d decided on travelling in a rush; Sunday night my brother Matthew had called me from the big city and asked if I wanted to see the world, and Monday morning I was outside stuffing a cab with my luggage while grinning from one ear to the other as I thought about all the exciting things I would soon be doing.

“Don’t worry, Dad,” I said and hugged him. “I’ll be good.”

But parents are always right.

Before a month had passed Matthew had gotten sick and tired of me crashing in his apartment. He said I did nothing but to throw parties for people we didn’t know and sleep around with every guest in his bed. “I thought you would come and make something out of yourself,” he said frustrated one evening as I was making coffee in the kitchen. As I didn’t reply, he went to my room, packed my things and put them in the hallway. He never asked me to leave, but he took away my key and broke my toothbrush into two pieces as a silly act of revenge. I left the same day, rented a space in a dirty apartment building and glanced through the newspaper for a job. As soon as my eyes caught the word ‘hospital’, I gave them a call. I imagined myself as a doctor or a surgeon of some sort, but I was hired as a clown.

“What’s better than to make children happy?” the secretary asked me as she told me I got the job.

I felt like telling her anything was better than staring at her hairdo.

**Part 3**  
My work was fairly easy; dress up silly and entertain the kids who has nothing else going for them. But though in description it sounds like I’d landed a dream job, I felt sick turning in for work every morning and heading to the beds where small, scrawny eyes would stare back at me as if they begged me to cure them. I knew no cure, I only knew how to blow a whistle, do a dance and tell a joke they’d heard a thousand times before. Some of them laughed at me and some of them cried, but no matter how the day turned out I always left with a sour taste of hospital food covering my tongue and a smell of medicine lingering in my hair.

“You’ll get better with time,” the nurses would tell me when they found me sitting depressed at lunch clinging onto a cup of coffee as if it could save me from my miseries. But time just seemed to pass without anything about me improving. I thought: maybe Dad is right, maybe I’ll never amount to anything.

It was on one of those depressing days that I decided to have my lunch elsewhere. I walked the halls at random with coffee in my right hand and a bag with a homemade sandwich in the other, and I whistled and skipped up and down stairs until I suddenly found myself in front of a door I recognised although I wasn’t sure from where. After getting it battled open with my elbow, I looked inside and realised why. There in bed was Arthur Kirkland, everything looking exactly the same as when I first found him, and I slowly walked up to him and leaned in over his bedside to glance at his face. His lips were pursed, almost as if he tried kissing the air, but there was no more colour to his white cheeks than there had been the last time I saw him.

“Well at least you’re not gasping for air,” I said. I hesitated a bit. Then I pulled over a chair and sat down next to him like a family member in the need of a moment alone. Like a brother watching his sibling slipping away, or a Dad saying goodbye to his son. But instead of being any of those I was just a clown eating my sandwich while wondering what kind of guy Arthur was. Was he someone who would laugh if I told him a joke about farting, or was he too refined to even consider that word to be part of his vocabulary? Somehow the hospital room made him look very grave. He couldn’t be much older than me, but with the white walls competing against his face to look the most like a ghost, I found that he could easily fool me to believe he had the intelligence of an old man.

“Why are you here anyway?” I mumbled around my sandwich but Arthur didn’t even flinch. “Me?” I asked myself the question, “well, I’m a clown. That’s all I could become in this life, a clown. Isn’t that funny?” Arthur didn’t smile. I sipped my coffee, finished my sandwich and threw out my trash. Besides my stuff the bin was empty.

I did a bow before heading for the door. “It was nice meeting you again, Arthur,” I said. The way he groaned made me think he heard me somewhere in his sleep. Maybe as a nuisance, I thought.  
  
 **Part 4**  
“I really wish I didn’t have that patient,” a nurse groaned in my ear as we both went out to have a smoke. I’d been at the hospital for two months and I’d started to become friendly with most of the staff. This woman was a Hungarian girl with long, brown hair and curious eyes which always seemed to stare right through you when she asked whether she should buy chocolate or a health-bar from the corner shop. I always said chocolate. She always got a health-bar.

“What patient?” I asked as I enjoyed my fifteenth smoke of the day while trying to avid being visible to the 3rd floor windows. Apparently a boy who went in to get his arm checked had seen me go downstairs after a horrible session with him and he’d complained that the ‘unfunny clown smoked when sad’. Apparently I was not teaching him a good lesson in life. Personally I thought I was doing great. I was saying:

“Hey, even at a hospital the doctors eat McD, the nurses get liposuctions and I smoke because I’m a clown!” But when I told my boss this, he didn’t laugh.

“Well,” the nurse sighed, “it’s Arthur. The guy who always sleeps. He’s so young and so alone, and yet no one visits him. I wonder how he ended up here in the first place.”

As it turned out, Arthur had a bit of a reputation. Everyone knew him and everyone had something sad to say about him. How he’d been at the hospital for longer than anyone could remember, how he was constantly in a haze and never fully present even when his eyes a seldom time opened, how he’d arrived with blood spurting from his head and a backpack hanging from his hand. They’d searched through it time and time again without finding any new clues to his identity. They weren’t even sure about his name, it had just been written in one of his many books, so they assumed that was it.

“Yeah, he’s weird,” I agreed with her and dropped my smoke as a family with three kids passed us by. “Hello, kids, remember to always treat others as you would like to be treated by them,” I greeted with a smile as the parents sent my cigarette a nasty look. “Unless you’re a masochist, of course.”  
  
 **Part 5**  
Arthur’s backpack was private property but still it hadn’t been locked away properly. As I visited him after work one day, I found it placed in the corner by the plants someone had put in there to freshen the room up. I sat down next to his bed and started rummaging through his things with slight interest.

His bag was stuffed with books on space; star constellations had been sketched down in his notebook, galaxies had been listed and renamed according to his own, strange theory, and old stories about how the star sky had changed over time had been printed out and neatly arranged into a blue plastic folder. “So you like space-stuff, hah?” I mumbled as I flipped through the pages and Arthur let go of a little breath which caused his lips to smile. I watched him and held up one of his books on black holes. “Do you want me to read to you?”

Arthur breathed again. His smile seemed to deepen. I watched him for a few seconds, but then I put the things away again.

“Don’t be stupid, Alfred,” I mumbled and slipped out a cigarette from the pocket of my jacket as I left the room. “He can’t hear you.”

**Part 6**  
Five months into my job I was asked to visit a child on the 5th floor. That floor was never good news; between the staff it was known as the last waiting space before death. Children no one really thought to have much luck anymore were gracefully rolled into the lift, carried to the floor and then put in a beautiful room to take their last breath. The kid I was supposed to meet with was suffering from cancer and thought to be days away from death. I’d never been this close to the grave before and I almost grimaced as I entered his room. It felt like death shouldn’t be so present in a place filled with toys and teddies.

“Hey, I’m Bozo,” I greeted the kid with my clown-name as I walked up to his bed.

He peeked back at me with small, grey eyes which he almost couldn’t keep open.

“Do you know the joke that goes-”

“No, Alfred,” he said and curled his lips around his two big front teeth as if he was embarrassed about them. I stopped in my joke and just stared at him as he took his time forming every word in his mouth which he wanted to speak. “No jokes. A story. Tell me a story.”

“Okay…” I pulled a chair close to his bed and glanced around the room. Normally parents would be present, but there was no one to be seen. It was just him and I. “What kind of story do you want?”

“Any story.” He closed his fingers around his duvet as he pulled it up to cover his face. I thought I heard him sobbing, but then it got quiet and minutes later he peeked up at me again. His eyes were red. “I just need not to be alone anymore.”

So I told him a story. I told him two. And before I knew what had gotten into me, I told him ten stories, three fairy tales, rewrote five well known works of literature into a summary which a nine year old kid could understand. I spent my whole day just sitting by his side and I think he needed it. By the time my mouth was so dry I couldn’t even cough my name, he was laughing so hard he was crying. As I left, he moved his lips in a silent thank you. By then he didn’t have the energy to speak.  
  
 **Part 7**  
The boy died a week later. That’s when I took it upon myself to read Arthur a bedtime story every day before going home.  
  
 **Part 8**  
Arthur’s notebooks were amazing tales of science I’d never heard before. As I read them, my fingers ran across the words and studied them, sucking in the new information I was given. I felt like I was brought to another world with every page I turned and it amazed me when I realised I was still right here in my own reality, just much further away than Arthur and I could ever go.

“Is this what you dream of?” I would sometimes ask him when finishing a story, and although he couldn’t answer me, I sensed he would’ve said yes if he could. I really wondered what he dreamt of. His brain damage mixed with the medicine was taking him far away, the nurses said, and they weren’t sure if he would ever fully come back. The first time he opened his eyes while I was in his room, I got shivers as I thought he’d woken up.

“He’s alive, he’s alive!” I screamed from the top of my lungs, and the doctors frowned at me as they entered just to find Arthur staring mindlessly up at the ceiling.

“He’s practically dead,” one of them responded and manually closed his eyelids down. It was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen done - a man who’s not dead was made to shut his eyes and pretend not to be present. As if I knew Arthur better than them, I growled that he didn’t like being touched. I’m not sure why.

It seemed as time passed, I became closer with Arthur than any of the nurses had ever. They would praise me when they saw me heading off to his room with a new article on stars I’d found online, but whatever they complimented me with didn’t really matter. To me it was part of my duty to sit guarding Arthur’s smiles and I did it with as much enthusiasm as I did whatever else was asked of me during the day. I’d slowly come to accept that I would never be an angry doctor or even a kind nurse, I was Bozo the Clown and that was all I could ever amount to. As I told my dad, he stopped calling me. Ashamed of his son, he decided I didn’t belong in his life anymore.

“Times are tough,” I told Arthur who didn’t flinch, and I slowly opened a book on stardust. “Well, shall we?”  
  
 **Part 9**  
As time passed life at the hospital became routine and even visiting Arthur didn’t touch me much. I would still sometimes sit and eat in silence while watching his face, and I would openly ponder about what had made him end up where he was at now. But with no answers my questions soon became boring and I stopped speaking to him at all but for the times I read him stories. I could’ve become just like any other person of the staff, treating him like a dead shell, had I not noticed something one day which turned my stomach upside down and made me feel like puking.

I’d been on my way to the staff room as I’d turned in for work late, but though I knew the hospital by now I somehow managed to get lost. It must have been fate which wanted me to wander right past Arthur’s room in that moment, because if I hadn’t I wouldn’t have seen the person leaning in over him, digging their nails into his skin and punching blue marks onto his pale limps.

I stood frozen in the doorway as I watched the violent act unfold, the guy going crazier by the second. “Why did you have to be so different?!” he screamed and raised his fists, and he would’ve slammed them to Arthur’s head had I not grabbed them in the same.

“What are you doing?!” I shouted but before I got a proper look at his face, he wriggled free of me and ran out the door. I stepped forward, ready to run after him but Arthur’s hand slipped from beneath the duvet in the same and grabbed me by the wrist. It wasn’t a strong hold, not even enough to keep me back, rather it was like a soft pat which still made me freeze and stare down at him. Arthur was smiling as the sound of his abuser’s footsteps disappeared down the hallway and I instantly knew I would never see this mysterious man again. But Arthur looked happy as if he planned for me not to catch him and as I squeezed his hand and slowly pushed it back beneath the duvet, he let go of a sigh which sounded like my name.

I thought to myself: “You’re no ordinary guy if someone can hate you like that.”  
  
 **Part 10**  
The experienced had shocked me and it brought me back to a basic which everyone else who knew Arthur had long surpassed. I started looking at everything in his bag with a new excitement as if I could find the missing clue they’d all overlooked, and slowly I started to notice patterns. Arthur’s notes weren’t mere sentences he’d copied from his favourite books, rather they were a clever code invented which took knowing every chapter of every book in his bag to solve.

Pages translated to sentences which translated to letters in a messy puzzle which left me sleeping over at the hospital to figure out. Once in a while the nurses would peek in at me and ask if I wasn’t going home soon, but I just kept shaking my head at them with such eagerness that I got an headache. I made notes and drew maps, I cried and I swore, I punched my firsts to  the floor until my knuckles turned bloody and my mind a mushy mess. But I wanted to understand, I wanted to translate at least one sentence from Arthur’s life and maybe get an idea, a little note on who he could be and what he had been up to by the time he got into the accident.

By the time the sun rose I only had six words, but they stood out on the page like nothing I’d ever read before. I cried as I read them. His notebook simply stated: “I am sorry I am different.”  
  
 **Part 11**  
“I got this for you,” I said as I put down the envelope on Arthur’s duvet. It was a week after I broke the code and translated his first sentence in the notebook, and I’d taken the days off because I needed time to breathe. I wasn’t sure when I started caring so much for a guy who’d never looked straight at me and spoken, but somehow I’d come to love Arthur on a level I couldn’t explain myself. “It’s a star. I bought it for you. Well, you know,” I huffed and waved my hands in the air in silly embarrassment, “they probably don’t really have a star that you can buy. I bet it’s a scam, but the certificate is nice. See-” I ripped the envelope open and held up the golden paper which stated that Arthur Kirkland owned a star by the name of Faith. “Because I have faith in your recovery,” I said and placed the diploma on the empty table before squeezing Arthur’s hand. He breathed out and smiled. “I have faith in you…”  
  
 **Part 12**  
At first I took time off from work myself because I needed the break, but soon my boss excused me day after day until he finally had to admit the truth to me.

“We can’t afford to have a clown running around here anymore,” he said. “Budget cuts. I’m sorry Alfred.”

It was as if everything broke inside of me. For long I’d had nothing to do with myself, no idea of how to make it through the day, and now I’d found the most basic thing I thought I was good at, but not even that could I do. With a frown on my lips keeping my eyes from spilling over, I packed my things at the hospital without really looking at everything I stuffed in my bag, and I didn’t say goodbye to the nurses. Like a bitter man beaten down I returned to my lousy apartment and went to bed for three days in a row. I didn’t answer the phone and I didn’t have to - no one called me to comfort me. I was all alone.

But then again I wasn’t.

As my first time which reminded me of a melodramatic soap-opera was over, I started rummaging through the things I’d taken with me back from the hospital. In between dirty lunch packages and an extra pair of shoes I found Arthur’s book. Like a detective I’d kept them in my locker to look at during breaks and now they’d ended up at home with me. I was a thief for having them and should’ve returned them the moment I found  them, but instead I sat down and started doing the only thing I knew how to do - I decoded his notebook. Sentence for sentence I started reading Arthur’s sad mind, and I found myself breathless by the time I was done.

Arthur Kirkland was indeed interested in space but for other reasons than what I’d thought. In his notebooks he described growing up as a different kid who always dreamt himself far away to places where no one would judge him for being who he is. Who he is was a soft man, a dreamer, a lover of the kind and an adorer of kind men’s lips on his own. ‘In space I could be free,’ he stated and so his interest in space started escalating. He was bullied at school, pushed around, called names and hated by everyone. As he fell in love with his best friend, he was stupid enough to reveal it to him openly. ‘He hated me for being different, he said, and he told me to go get cured. I’m going to do the only thing I know how to - break my skull and put that brain straight. There’s got to be a way to put my brain straight.’

But Arthur’s brain had been messed up badly and now he couldn’t even tell.  
  
 **Part 13**  
I went to the hospital that night. The nurses flocked around me to express how sorry they were about letting go of me and how they’d missed me and did I come to visit them? I brushed them off with a growl as I went straight for the lift to Arthur’s floor. As I entered his room, I found him with bruises down the side of his face. I shuddered - I knew exactly who the man was that had done it though I had no name and no face. My proof was Arthur’s notebook.

I slowly put it down on his bedside table as I moved to sit close to him. I watched his sleeping face, his slow breathing, his hand which hung out from beneath the duvet. I grabbed it and squeezed it. “I’m so sorry,” I said. Or it was what I wanted to say, but instead I sobbed out the words in an unrecognizable manner. I sat with his hand clenched between mine as I started howling: “I’m so, so sorry there was no one there for you. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you. Seems like I really am good at nothing. I can’t even be there for a dying guy.” I pressed his hand to my face as I hissed: “I’m such a failure, I can’t even be a clown for you anymore. I can just leave you to fate.”

And that’s when it happened. That’s when Arthur’s fingers slowly closed around my hand and softly squeezed it, and I looked up and straight into his green eyes which stared back at me. They really stared back at me - not the ceiling or the air or some random spot in the room, but he eyed me closely as his pale lips parted in a last effort to speak:

“There’s… nothing greater…” he breathed in a wheezing voice and smiled: “…than making… people… smile again.” And he grinned. He grinned so brightly I felt my heart sink and the world around me disappear, and by the time I bashed my eyelashes and looked around again, I wasn’t in the hospital. I was at home in my own bed sweating from a nightmare. I was clinging onto Arthur’s notebook with the translation humbly written on the side. I felt I needed to hurry and hand it to him.  
  
 **Part 14**  
Arthur wasn’t at the hospital. Arthur was nowhere to be found and no one knew what had happened to him. I screamed at the nurses in anger, I cried to the doctors, but all they could do was to shrug their shoulders and look away. Arthur was gone. He’d left the certificate behind.

For years I couldn’t stand looking at it. It was hidden away along with my other things from the time in the hospital, the notebook with the poor translation on top of it, and I didn’t dare to even think about any of it as I made it through my day. I thought I knew who’d come to get him, I thought: “So the man got away with it in the end. He made Arthur ruin his skull, and now he’s taken him away to die.” I couldn’t know how very wrong I was.

As five years had passed, I’d gotten offered a job at a library in another town. It was my chance to get out of the louse apartment and start a new life. As I was packing my things away and throwing out everything I didn’t need, I came across the box from the hospital. I slowly peeled out the golden diploma and looked at it with a grimace before dropping it into the bin. But as I did so, the paper turned in the air and I found myself staring at some writing on the back of it. There in the corner of the diploma someone had written a message in the hurry. All it read was:

  
_There’s nothing greater than making people smile again._


End file.
